Review: TomTom iOS Hands Free Car Kit

Echo-cancellationImproved speakerExtendable micNo additional GPS circuitrySpeaker not powerful enough for musicBluetooth reconnection issuePrice

The new TomTom Hands Free Car Kit replaces the original Car Kit - and that's ultimately a bit of a shame; it's bulkier and sticks more out more.

On its own, it's £20 cheaper than its predecessor, or you can opt for the Navigation Pack that includes the Western Europe version of TomTom's excellent sat-nav app; the £50 price tag of the app is just added to the £80 of the cradle, however.

We'll have to spend some time with the new TomTom-powered sat nav in iOS 6 to see whether it's a reasonable alternative to the full TomTom app, but regardless, there's no financial benefit to buying the bundle.

There's no dedicated GPS circuitry in the Hands Free Car Kit - TomTom says that the new generation of iPhones don't need this boosting. This might be a little premature though, the same iPhone 4S used in both models seemed to be less certain about positioning and slow to update when in this new model.

It has a boosted speaker, echo-cancellation and an extendable mic. But while yes, calls are more intelligible for both parties, the louder, slightly richer speaker is still too weedy to be used to listen to audiobooks or radio at motorway speeds.

Worse, the Bluetooth seemed to need to be manually reconnected if you leave your car and then come back. Ultimately, we'd consider buying a cheaper, simpler cradle.

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Review: TomTom Hands Free Car Kit for Android

Robust designBluetooth pairing worked wellSpeaker volumePrice too highDoesn't do enough

£20. That's the price difference between this Hands-free car kit for your Smartphone and the cheapest TomTom sat-nav, the Start 20 UK & Ireland.

£20 doesn't seem like an awful lot, especially when the difference between the two products is so vast, so its £20 we were eyeing up before we even opened up this kit that turns your smartphone into your in-car navigation.

The TomTom Start 20 is a stand-alone sat nav offering lane guidance, spoken street names and access to TomTom's maps. This hands-free kit meanwhile relies on your mobile phone to do the hard work and merely holds your phone at the right angle. Actually it does a little more, but we're not convinced it really does enough.

The kit itself is made up of several parts, but the main unit is a reassuringly robust holder for your phone, boasting an integrated 2W speaker, an extendable microphone and a charger.

This unit plugs into your cigarette lighter via standard USB cable and charger, while a pass-through cable can be used to charge your phone while you're out and about too. This last point is important because using your phone's GPS will rapidly run down your phones battery on even a modest journey.

The big selling point for the TomTom Hands-free car kit is that despite plugging in to your phone and holding it in place, the communication is actually handled over Bluetooth. This means you can enjoy hands-free calling, even when you're phone isn't docked. Simply pair the car kit and your phone up and you're good to go.

The mounting system is versatile, capable of holding your phone in portrait or landscape mode and as it support phones up to 127.5mm high and 80.5mm wide, it should hopefully outlive your current mobile phone. We did find it quite a bulky mounting system though, requiring locating higher up the screen that we'd want with a dedicated sat-nav, and thus obscuring more of the windscreen.

In operation we found the TomTom Hands-free car kit for Smartphone to be lacklustre. The speaker volume was a little louder than the phone itself, but still too quiet to have your radio on at the same time. The standard Google Navigation voice sounds fine coming from the phones speaker, but sounds clipped and hollow through this.

You could use the kit to transform your phone into your in-car music player, but the speaker quickly shows its weaknesses here, and well, basically you'll only try this once and then never murder your music collection like that ever again.

The pricing hangs heavy over this kit as a value proposition too, coming in as it does so close to TomTom's own budget sat nav, the TomTom Start 20. We'd pick that up over this every time.

If you do want to use your phone as a sat nav, car kits for the most popular phones can be picked up for less than £10, with more versatile units with charges bouncing in for £20.

Of course such bargain solutions don't have the Bluetooth cleverness that TomTom has used, but then having used it, we're not convinced that such features add enough to warrant the price hike anyway.

TomTom is capable of much more than this, but as it stands it just doesn't do enough to warrant the high price tag. Even spend more on a proper sat nav, or a little less on a cheaper mounting system. Just don't bother with this.

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Amazon Kindle Fire HD: Hands on

Amazon yesterday launched four variations of its Kindle Fire, and with these tablets, the company has clearly set its sights on capturing more than just the 22 percent of the tablet market it says it already owns. Where the original Kindle Fire released last fall felt rushed and unpolished, the new models are refined in both their hardware and software. Attractively priced starting at $199 for the high-definition-capable tablets, Amazon is aiming for a cut of your holiday shopping budget, and serves notice to other tablet makers that the game has changed. Again.

From a tablet user's perspective, I found the original Kindle Fire lacking. But Amazon beat other tablet makers -- including Apple -- when it came to integration with Amazon's media acquisition and Web services. Google has since improved how its Play store integrates into the greater whole of the Android OS apps, but I still like aspects of Amazon's smooth approach.

And now, Amazon couples that smooth software integration with dramatically improved hardware, inside and out.

I'll focus here on the 7-inch, $199 Kindle Fire HD. With its September 14 ship date, this is the first of the three HD models to hit the market. It's also the only HD model that Amazon made available for journalists to manhandle at its demo tables (the 8.9-inch tablet only demoed by Amazon executives). The other two HD models, the $299 Kindle Fire HD 8.9-inch and the $499 Kindle Fire 8.9-inch 4G LTE + Wi-Fi, are scheduled to ship November 20.

The Kindle Fire HD's design is more svelte and polished than the original Kindle Fire. Its corners are curved, and an elegant yet subtle angle along the edges distinguishes it from the plethora of other black tablets on the market. The back has a slight rubberized texture, while the front has a glossy black bezel—a surprisingly wide one surrounding the display.

This bezel makes the unit a little wider than comparable 7-inch tablets. It measures 7.6 by 5.4 by 0.4 inches, which makes it slimmer than the Kindle Fire. I generally liked how the tablet felt in-hand, but I couldn't yet gauge how it feels to use one-handed for an extended period of time, for example.

When you turn on the tablet, you can clearly see the HD difference and the much-needed effort that Amazon put into this Fire's display. The Kindle Fire HD has a bright 1280-by-800-pixel display with optical bonding. As we've seen on other tablets—including Barnes & Noble's Nook Tablet, Acer's Iconia Tab A700, and Google's Nexus 7—optical bonding eliminates the air gap, which boosts contrast and helps keep text sharp and crisp. I'd say that these display enhancements alone makes the $199 Kindle Fire HD a worthwhile upgrade over the 1024-by-600-pixel, $159 Kindle Fire, especially for anyone who will to use a Kindle tablet for reading books, periodicals, and Web sites.

Inside, Amazon has significantly beefed up the Kindle Fire HD's components, starting with its dual-core 1.2GHz Texas Instruments OMAP 4460 processor. We'll know more about Amazon's claims of performance superiority over the Nvidia Tegra 3-based Nexus 7 once we get a Fire HD into the lab. The Kindle Fire HD menus seemed snappy and responsive, whether I was moving among apps, playing games, or opening up and fast forwarding through the high-definition movie The Hunger Games.

Google's Nexus 7 (top) is slightly narrower than the Kindle Fire HD.

But even without formal testing, Amazon trumps Google simply on storage value for your dollar. At $199, the Kindle Fire HD packs 16GB of storage, twice what the Nexus 7 offers. Go up to the $249 version for 32GB of storage, twice what Google offers at that price. Given Amazon's aggressive pricing, I wouldn't be surprised to see Google try to match it by offering specials or a price drop on the Nexus 7 as we head into the critical holiday shopping season.

Hardware-wise, the Kindle Fire HD has a front-facing camera, Bluetooth, micro-USB for data transfers and power, and micro-HDMI-out. It also boosts Wi-Fi performance by adding dual-band, dual-antenna MIMO.

Aside from the vastly improved display, the most exciting new hardware feature is the Kindle Fire HD's Dolby Digital Plus audio processing coupled with dual-driver stereo speakers. Integrated audio on tablets is a longstanding sore spot, with one tablet after another producing pitiful or barely tolerable audio output through its built-in speakers. It was difficult to gauge the Dolby Digital Plus audio in the noisy demo environment, but I also got a private demo and was impressed by how the technology might improve audio on tablets. Amazon is first to implement it, and even though the company says it's an exclusive feature, Dolby says we will hear Dolby Digital Plus on other tablets.

Amazon didn't discuss its Silk Web browser during the launch event, but this Web browser caching technology, introduced last year, operates inside the new Kindle Fires. The browser's new features include an updated HTML 5 rendering engine, a refreshed start page, and both full-screen and vertical reading modes for text-heavy pages. Amazon says the browser is 30 to 40 percent faster, but that statistic that couldn't be confirmed in the demo environment.

Amazon has spruced up its Kindle Fire OS with a noticeably improved interface. The home screen is simper, ditching the visually kludgy bookshelf metaphor. Instead, the OS has big, bold icons in the vertical scroll menu, category access along the top nav, and shortcut icons to functions within some apps (such as mail, which now lets you directly launch a new message from the home screen).

The Kindle Fire OS gets a boost, too: Now, it's a custom skinning of Android's 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, a notable jump up from its previous 2.3 Gingerbread roots.

The update to 4.0 bodes suggests Amazon will amass more tablet apps optimized for larger displays. The extra space makes a difference in how apps display and run. When asked whether the Amazon Appstore will denote which apps are optimized for the larger screen, Amazon Kindle executive Dave Limp offered an oblique answer, saying that the vast majority of the Appstore's apps are already optimized, and that the store will deliver the correct version of the app depending upon the device you're using. It's unclear how many of the apps in the Appstore will properly support that 8.9-inch tablet, but Amazon does have a couple of months to sort out the details before release.

The original Kindle Fire didn't impress me. And while this new version's lower price of $159 helps soften the compromises you make with this tablet, it still feels like you're paying too much for too little.

Physically, the new iteration of the 1024-by-600-pixel resolution Kindle Fire looks nearly identical to its predecessor. The dimensions are nearly the same, although the new version shaves 1mm off the height and 13 grams off the weight. Sadly, the power button remains in the same awkward spot along the vertical edge of the tablet. It was hard to tell from the locked-down demo whether the slight design tweaks are sufficient to mitigate the nuisance of the Fire accidentally shutting down when you simply rest a hand on the edge bearing that sensitive off switch.

Inside, the Fire gains a 20 percent faster processor and twice the memory of its predecessor, according to Amazon's purposely vague specs. I saw no real lag and found the tablet responsive to casual use, although it was impossible to tell whether the revamped Fire is anywhere near 40 percent faster as Amazon claims.

Even at its new, lower price and with its more responsive menus, the Fire still feels pricey for what it is. It has just 8GB of on-board storage, and it's chunky by comparison to its svelte siblings. Once the Fire drops into orbit of $100—even settling in at, say, $125—the standard-def Fire may be worth consideration. But at its current level, the step up to the 16GB Kindle Fire HD is with the $40 price bump if you plan to use the tablet as a media consumption device, as Amazon expects.

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Hands on with the Nokia Lumia 920

Nokia followed up the unveiling of its new Windows 8 phones on Wednesday with a demo session providing some hands-on time with the Lumia 920 and Lumia 820. Getting up close and personal with these phones gave me the chance to see some of the advances Nokia touted during Wednesday’s press event.

The 920 itself is is slick, glossy, and eye catching in its new yellow, red, and grey colors. The body felt firm and solid in my hand, while the 920’s display looked sharp, bright, and colorful. The 4.5-inch curved display pops, thanks in large part to the 1280x768 pixel resolution and Nokia’s ClearBlack technology. (That’s the Nokia technology aimed at making screens more visible when you’re outdoors.)

Turning to the phone’s Windows 8 interface, I found the live tiles easy to move (as they were in Windows Phone 7) and easy to resize from small, medium, and large. Large-sized tiles display the most information about the app in question; for example, when I resized the email app to the large tile size, it showed the last email read.

The 920 reacts instantly to commands, operating smoothly and without any lag, thanks to its Snapdragon 4 processor. I can’t stress enough how amazing photos look on the 920’s display.

The demo area also gave Nokia the chance to show off some of the 920’s camera features, specifically its “floating-lens” technology for image stabilization. Side-by-side screens displayed video captured both with and without the image stabilization. The difference was remarkable: video captured using Nokia’s image stabilization technology was noticeably less jittery and shaky than the video taken without, giving the 920 an edge over rival smartphones on the camera front.

Accessories took a prominent role in the demo area, with most stations showing off a number of wireless charging options, including a colored oval flat plate, astanding ‘nightstand’ dock, and the Fatboy pillow. All of these charging options worked as soon as the handset was set down upon them, although finding the exact right spot occasionally took me a try or two. The highlight of the wireless charging demos was the JBL Power Up speaker system; it not only charges the handsets but also broadcasts music from the phone, and has a remarkable range. One Nokia rep told me she was able to place calls in her bathroom while the speaker system in her bedroom continued to stream music from her phone.

All the Nokia reps in the demo area were also wearing Nokia Purity Pro Stereo Headphones made by Monster. These headphones feature near-field communication (NFC) capabilities so that they can be paired to the new Lumia handsets.

All in all, the Lumia 920 looks lovely, performs smoothly, and has a deluge of features—especially if your smartphone doubles as a camera. While many of the physical aspects of the new phone were similar to the older Lumia models—save for that exceptional camera—it’s the software that really stands out. Camera features like the ability to add motion or delete people who’ve wandered into the shot along with the phone’s augmented reality-flavored City Lens option will likely set the Lumia apart from other Windows Phone handsets.

The predominant question about the Lumia 920 among people in the demo room seemed to be when they could get one. They’ll have to wait: Nokia hasn’t announced availability for pricing for the new models, though both the 920 and 820 will arrive in select markets later this year.

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